The Parameters of Postmodernism

pleted evolution" (26), the "terminal point" (49), or the "abolition" (63) of this or that artistic or institutional tradition, Bürger's argument insists that avant-garde art must either break
with and abolish its parent institutions or else be broken with
and abolished by its critics and historians. Not surprisingly, Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde exterminates its object.4 So
far as Bürger is concerned, the postmodern era witnesses "the
end of the historical avant-garde movements" (liii).
Notes

Lyotard remarks upon the same kind of impulse in a
more general context, observing, "When power assumes the
name of a party, realism and its neoclassical complement triumph over the experimental avant-garde by slandering it and
banning it" (Postmodern Condition, 75).

Bonito-Oliva, Baudrillard, and the
Collapse of the New

One discovers much the same conclusions in the writings of
the Italian art historian and polemicist Achille Bonito-Oliva.
Conflating Bfirger's thesis with both his own enthusiasm for
the revived expressionism of the Italian trans-avant-garde and
with the extravagant revelations of the French visionary Jean
Baudrillard, Bonito-Oliva boosts the B-effect by diagnosing the
death of the high-tech postmodern avant-garde. According to Bonito-Oliva's reasoning, the superficiality of the contemporary

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